In Bed With Lord Byron

and money.
    In a panic, I procrastinated. The green light of my answerphone was winking. I must listen to my messages, I told myself, they might be utterly urgent.
    Unfortunately, they weren’t. Just one from Anthony confirming he was taking me out to dinner tonight and telling me to wear something extra nice.
    I sidled into Kay’s office, praying hard.
    ‘Was there anything on the answerphone from Alain Botson?’ she snapped.
    Alain Botson was a TV presenter with his own popular science programme. He had a hoary beard and wore heavy glasses, but he’d become a bit of a sex symbol with older women. Apparently he
got sacks of knickers sent to him daily.
    ‘I . . .’ I paused. ‘Er, yes,’ I gibbered. ‘He called and said he wants to give you a quote to put on the cover of your book
Exploring Unified Field Theory: A
Radical Reinterpretation of Superstring Theory and the Lagrangian of the Superstring
. He said he wants to say, um . . . how did he put it, “This is the most exciting book I’ve read
in years – I stayed up all night turning the pages in a frenzy.”’
    A change came over my boss’s face. Her tight, budded mouth unfurled into a sweet rose. Her eyes glimmered behind her glasses.
    ‘Well,’ she said, a smile catching in her voice, ‘then we must write him a kind reply. “Dear Alain, Thank you so much for your kind offer of a quote. I do hope that I can
repay the favour by taking you out to dinner sometime . . .”’
    Lucy,
a cross voice said inside my head,
why did you lie? Now what’s going to happen if Alain sends a letter with a polite fuck-off: this book is a load of crap and I’d
rather use it as a bonfire than give it a quote?
    Then I looked up and saw the dreamy look on her face. She was staring into the distance, no doubt picturing moonlit walks involving intense discussions about the elasticity of time; bedroom
frolics where they explored equilateral triangles. Love was a funny thing, I thought. Here was Dr Merrick, with zillions of letters tap-dancing after her name, a member of Mensa, regular science
columnist in the
Guardian,
acting like a teenage girl at a pop concert. I wondered if I ought to tell her that I’d recently read in a
Sunday Times
supplement that Alain was
married. Soon my guilt was overridden by laughter tickling my stomach. I kept trying to bite it back, but it poured up my throat.
    ‘What?’ She broke off in surprise.
    ‘Sorry – I’m just . . . I was thinking about the package,’ I improvised. ‘I’m dying to know what’s in it, aren’t you? I’m getting so
excited!’
    ‘Lucy, really, do try to concentrate,’ she tutted, but after we had finished the letter and had a chat over coffee (it was amazing the way she could threaten to fire me one minute
and act like I was her favourite daughter the next), she suggested we open the parcel.
    So, like little kids with a Christmas present, we set to work. Peels of brown paper rippled across the floor like flat fish. Finally we were left with a large corrugated-cardboard box with
BRACKLIG!
stamped all over it. I’m good at languages and I was used to eccentric packages, so I knew that was Swedish for ‘FRAGILE’. Kay used her Stanley knife to cut away
the thick swadges of brown sticky tape sealing it and we pulled back the flaps. Beneath the cellophane wrapping were lots of parts, many encased in green plastic. It looked worryingly like one of
those wardrobe kits from MFI.
    ‘What the fuck . . .?’ she muttered, and we exchanged bemused smiles.
    ‘Here’s an envelope,’ I said. She opened it, drawing out a wodge of papers and photocopies and journals, with a letter pinned to the top.
    ‘It’s a time machine,’ she said carelessly, passing the papers over to me. ‘Read up on this, will you, and type up a summary and a reply thanking him.’
    ‘But . . .’ I spluttered back giggles.
    ‘Remember that only a hundred years ago people thought that the idea of the earth revolving around the sun was poppycock. Perhaps in another hundred years’ time people will look back
on us and laugh at our inability to escape from the present,’ she said crisply, but there was a twinkle in her eye too.
    After she had gone, however, I remembered Stephen Hawking’s thoughts on time travel – perhaps the most simple and sensible I had heard: ‘I do not think time travel is possible,
otherwise we would have been visited by people from the future.’ Dr Schwartzman, I concluded, was probably